Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

If you follow trends in music, or music videos, you’ve undoubtably noticed the design trend of three horizontal bands of video each showing different action, or three different shots of the same subject. The first time I noticed this was in a Kanye West music video for Gold Digger (w/ Jamie Foxx, director Hype Williams) where the action occurs in a wide-horizontal strip, leaving the top and bottom for meta information and overlays:

Although the top and bottom are not used explicitly, I feel they’re enough distinguished to justify naming this technique after the song. A better example might be Beyonce’s (w/ Slim Thug, director Hype Williams) Check on it, where we get to see Beyonce glittering on a strips of pink fabric top and bottom, or a three-way shot of smoking Slim Thug:

Then, there’s Jamie Foxx’s Unpredictable video (director, Hype Williams), where we see the same Hype-Williams effect:

Wikipedia, if you go check out his entry, has a blurb describing this:

For most of his more recent videos, Williams creates a letterbox effect by having a main image in the middle (where a film would be in letterbox format) and having a second image behind it, split by the first image. As he had done in the past, Williams continues to front each video he directs with a title sequence, which presents his name, the name of the music artist(s), and the name of the song in a stylized format matching the video clip to follow.

For some more examples, see Pharrell Williams’ (of NERD) Angel:

Or the Robin Thicke (w/ Pharrell Williams) song Wanna love you girl:

If we go check out Hype William’s latest videos page, we’ll see the videos we’ve listed, and more. So, although I’ve dubbed it the “Gold Digger” technique it could easily be called “Hype Williams’ 1-hit-wonder.” I would prefer to reward creativity and diversity over repeating the same theme at least five times in the past year. Aren’t you getting tired of seeing this?

Engadget just posted about this chill camera. Take a look:

You can check out the PC Magazine digital camera review, but I’ll give you a summary:

• 12X Optical Zoom
• Automatic image stabilization
• 6 Megapixels (6MP) or 2816 x 2112 pixels
• SD card support, 16mb built in memory
• $400 retail price
• 2.5″ LCD screen

The full spec sheet can be found at dpreview, but all the specifications feel very nice. And, at $400, this editor’s award winning digital camera is both powerful and affordable. If I had to buy a new one, I might take a serious look at this pro-consumer offering.

I uploaded two short clips to Google Video on February 25, 2006. Guess what, Google, it’s April 8th now and they’re still not live. I keep getting a “Video is verified; stay tuned – it will be live shortly” message when I log in:

What’s wrong with this picture? I upload two less than 10s video clips to Google Video a month and a half ago, and they’ve yet to be released in a form where I can use it. Now, if I used major competitor YouTube, I’d have these videos live and published on my blog in the same few minutes. I’ve emailed Google Video, but unless the time-to-live becomes reasonable, bloggers and home users are not going to jump on the bandwagon.

While major TV studios and movie companies may be useful assets, the real force behind a video sharing system is the viral nature of user-uploaded content. Without efficient publication of that content, Google Video is a crippled Web 2.0 application.

Update

Thanks for your email. We understand that your videos have been verified, but has not gone “live.” We looked into your account and found that the videos listed below do not meet our minimum length requirement of 10 seconds:

MOV01787.MPG length = 3.92 seconds
MOV01674.MPG length = 2.48 seconds

Please make sure the videos you upload meet our minimum technical requirements. To review our technical requirements, please visit: video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26579&topic=1488.

If you have additional Google Video questions, please feel free to visit our Help Center at video.google.com/support. We hope you’ll visit Google Video in the future to see our additions and improvements.